Tea at Trianon: What Jane Heard

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, January 31, 2019

What Jane Heard

From the Oxford University Press blog:

It can be tempting to make connections to famous composers roughly contemporary with Austen. This usually means the ‘greats’ of late 18th- and early 19th-century Vienna: composers such as Mozart and Beethoven, whose music is most familiar to classical music audiences today. Studies that draw comparisons between Austen’s fiction and Viennese instrumental music rest on the (usually unstated) assumption that music we now consider great encapsulates its own era in some way that can be related to Austen’s achievement. There is no attempt to establish a historical context in which Austen herself may have known this music or become familiar with its strategies. Thus while such comparisons may generate new readings of her work for those willing to accept the somewhat problematic aesthetics of the point of departure, they provide little insight on Austen’s own musical experience or its relation to her writing. And they are no help at all in understanding the English music culture of her time, the environment her own readers would have understood as the frame of reference for musical scenes in her fiction.

Austen’s family music books furnish a snapshot of at least some of the music Austen knew and performed. The books, held by Jane Austen’s House Museum and private owners descended from the Austen family, are now freely available online as digital facsimiles. Just under half of the surviving volumes belonged to Austen herself, and she certainly knew the books owned by other members of her family. In total, the 18 books include just over six hundred pieces of music, mainly for voice, keyboard and harp, all of it suitable for domestic performance by skilled amateur musicians. (Read more.)